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All organisations have a culture - patterns of beliefs, attitudes, assumptions and behaviours which distinguish you and your staff from other organisations.

Although culture is not something you can see or easily detect, it is real and has a profound influence on your organisation and staff. It tells people how to cope with environmental changes to ensure survival and how people should relate to one another to achieve what they have set out to achieve.

In short, an organisation's culture is "the way we do things around here."

The Benefits of Analysing Organisational Culture

Analysis leads to understanding. Understanding your culture helps to explain the feelings, attitudes, expectations, values and assumptions of your staff.

Culture constrains strategy; an understanding of your culture can thus be used as a source of strategic strength by managing within the boundaries of the culture or, if necessary, changing it. Analysing your culture and seeking feedback on employee perceptions provides information so you can recognise problems before they reach unmanageable levels. 

You can then predict (and therefore manage) the impact of new technologies, processes and behaviours.

Surveying your employee and/or customer perceptions before and after change initiatives can help you to monitor the consequences of major business decisions and the efficacy of change programmes.  

The Process

Conducting a thorough analysis of your culture can take 2 - 3 months depending on the size of your organisation. Learning in Action recommends using an integrated approach consisting of three main methods:

• observation,
• interviews/discussions and
• survey questionnaire(s). 

Using a variety of measuring techniques is important for addressing issues of reliability and validity. This provides different types of information essential to identifying patterns of relationships between different parts of your culture.

The analysis should be a joint effort between yourself and Learning in Action, as this will uncover the essential assumptions and their patterns of interrelationships. A joint effort also protects against subjective bias and misinterpretation. Please contact us for more infrormation.

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